Jen Bokal - Her Rocky Mountain Hero

Cody looked at Viktoria. Her eyes were wide, her gaze trained on a walkie-talkie they hadn’t even noticed, nestled between the SUV’s front seats.

“That’s got to be the guys who took your son,” Cody said, while reaching for the walkie-talkie.

She folded her hands together and pressed the sides of her thumbs into her lips. “So, what do we do now?”

Just because they’d escaped together didn’t mean they were on the same side. No matter what, she was a Mateev. The name alone brought back painful memories that lodged in his chest—a leaden ball full of spikes. All the same, Cody was determined to get the kid back, which meant he had to work with the mother. Besides, he reasoned, once they’d rescued her son, Cody could still finish the job—turn the kid over to CPS and question Viktoria before she was taken away by the police.

“Bravo.” The single word rang out like a shot. Viktoria started.

“What do they want?” she asked.

It was a good question with a horrific answer. “My guess is that they’re checking to make sure that you’re dead.”

A gust of cold wind blew through the shattered window. Viktoria folded her arms across her chest and looked away. Cody turned the SUV’s thermostat to ninety degrees, its upper limit. The hot air hit him and he started to sweat. Small price to pay if it would make her more comfortable.

What was it with his reactions to this woman?

“We can’t ignore them,” she said and turned to him. “This could be our chance to try to negotiate my son’s release.”

Cody understood her desperation and admired her bravery. “It won’t work. First, there’s nothing we have that they want,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Unless there is. Do you have any idea why this happened?”

Her gaze never left his. “They want my son,” she said, “and for me to be...neutralized.”

Cody wasn’t sure if Viktoria was purposely not revealing the real story behind the kidnapping, but at this point he needed to view this situation tactically. What he needed was a plan and intel.

“Let’s start with what you know,” Cody said.

“I know my son is safe,” Viktoria said. “The man in the cabin, the one who held me at gunpoint...” Her voice trailed off and Cody gave her a moment to reconcile with the nightmare she’d survived. “He told me that Gregory belonged to his grandfather Nikolai.”

Like a piece from a puzzle, the latest bit of information clicked into place. Once again it came down to Nikolai Mateev—the head of the Moscow-based Mateev crime family.

Now Cody knew Viktoria’s relationship with the Mateevs. Yet in getting that one answer, it brought up hundreds of questions. He swallowed them all, practically choking on his desire to ask about the drug trafficking ring.

“These men are desperate and if we try to negotiate, they’ll know they failed.” He paused. His next words would be hard, no, devastating, for a mother to hear.

“And?” she insisted.

“Failure to have killed you might force these men to abandon their plans to take your son from the country.”

She leaned forward, her eyes bright. “That’s good. They’ll release Gregory.”

“Unless they don’t.” Cody couldn’t bring himself to verbalize Gregory’s possible fate.

Viktoria understood, though. Like she’d been sucker punched in the gut, Viktoria sucked in a deep breath and sat back hard in her seat. In a way, Cody supposed she had been hit, and he’d been the one to deliver the blow.

“Bravo?” A voice, barely audible, rose from the static. “Update?”

“What if you answered them,” she proposed, “and pretended to be one of them. They can’t see who’s speaking and the connection is full of static on our end. It has to be the same on theirs.”

Cody sat taller. It was a crazy idea. “That can go wrong in a million different ways. If they figure out that I’m lying, Gregory’s the one who could suffer the most.”

“Please!” she said. Her fingers rested on the back of Cody’s hand. Those old internal scars, the ones he’d developed and nurtured into his own personal armor long ago, began to ache. “This could be my only hope of finding my son. I’d do it myself, but obviously even with the bad connection I’m not a man.”

Viktoria was right about that—she was all woman.

“Bravo. Copy.”

Cody didn’t like playing games with people’s lives, and especially the lives of children. But Viktoria was the mother and it was her call. Without another moment’s thought, he depressed the talk button. “This is Bravo,” he said. “Copy.” He hoped they continued to use English. His ability to speak Russian was nonexistent.

“Where the hell have you been?” the voice barked.

This was something else Cody feared. Before he had to think of a reason for their delay, the voice rang out again.

“Status update.”

Cody’s gaze met Viktoria’s. He refused to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t shown up when he did. Yet, that’s exactly what the man on the walkie-talkie needed to believe. Cody flicked his eyes to the windshield. He watched the snow dance in the beams of the headlights.

He depressed the talk button. “Neutralized.”

“Come again?”

Like he’d just sprinted the last three hundred yards of a marathon, Cody’s pulse hammered and his chest constricted. If these guys knew each other well, they could very easily recognize voices, even with the bad connection.

Cody silently cursed. He was committed now. “Neutralized,” he said again. This time he was slower. Louder.

A second passed. Then another. It seemed like hours.

“Copy that,” the kidnapper said. “Extraction is delayed twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Plane can’t land due to the incoming blizzard. Return to your safe house and wait for my call. Belkin’s orders.”

Cody’s head dropped back against the headrest and he let out a long sigh. He had to keep the smile from his voice. “Copy,” he said.

He tossed the walkie-talkie onto the console between the seats and scrubbed his face with both hands. He turned to Viktoria. “We might not know everything, but at least we know that your son is in the area and likely to remain here for the next day to day and a half. That’s good. Most important,” he added, “is that we have a name.”

He turned to look at Viktoria. Even in the SUV’s darkened interior he could see that she’d gone pale. She licked her lips and exhaled. “I know who Belkin is.”

* * *

Gregory’s face flashed in Viktoria’s mind. She pictured what he must have gone through tonight. Gregory’s dark eyes, so much like her own, would have sought her out, wild with terror. Then, her throat closed at the memory of the very real hand that had squeezed her neck.

She had failed her son. Would she ever be able to forgive herself?

“Can you drive?” Cody asked Viktoria. “We need to get off the road.”

Viktoria’s head snapped over. She had almost forgotten about Cody, her handsome savior.

“Drive?” It took effort to say the word, as if her tongue were heavy. A sheer cliff rose upward on one side and the road fell sharply away on the other. Snowflakes, fat and thick, fell from the sky and dusted the roadway. They blew in through the shattered window. Balls of safety glass coated the car’s interior and twinkled with reflected light from the dashboard.

“Let’s get out of the middle of the road,” he said. “We aren’t safe here. If you can’t drive, I can.”

Drive? Yes, she could drive. Shifting the SUV into Reverse, Viktoria eased away from the guardrail. The simple task unleashed a burst of adrenaline within her. “We should go to the sheriff,” she said, thankful that she finally made a decision.